The Bible Nerd

Ok, ok, so I thought the book series that my wife bought was a little cheesy.  It is called “Heroes for Young Readers” and it puts famous missionaries and Christian heroes of the faith lives into poems for kids.  How can you reduce an amazing person’s life into something that always rhymes in four lines?  But I had to repent, because my little kids love these books and actually know who Jim Elliot is now.  There is a stack of them in our bathroom, and now I sneak a peek at them, and have learned quite a bit myself (the shame that I am learning church history in kids’ books…).  How do I explain to my seven year old why Jim Elliot died?  He was only 28 years old and was trying to reach out to and help a tribal people in Ecuador.  He died so young because he did exactly the right thing.

Our brain just has such a hard time computing the fact that we can suffer because we are doing the RIGHT thing in this world.  It just seems wrong and not fair, that we can suffer for the very reason that we are being obedient to God and trying to be a blessing to make this world a better place.  The Bible, however, makes it clear that sometimes when we are suffering, this is exactly the case.

1 Peter is one of the best books to look at this teaching.  Peter is trying to comfort and encourage the New Testament church, which has been undergoing persecution since its beginning.  He can’t give them the false hope that everything will get better eventually, and the fact is that it is about to get much worse.  A few short years after he writes this letter, Nero goes completely crazy (rather than just mostly crazy), and begins a massive persecution of Christians.  Peter can give them the big picture and share a few pieces of wisdom.  First, Peter says in 3:17, “For it is better to suffer for doing good, if that should be God’s will, than for doing evil.”  Lots of people in the world are suffering for doing evil; criminals are in jail, sexually immoral people have STDs, and manipulative, greedy people are lonely and depressed.  These people are not only suffering now for what they have done, they have no eternal reward to look forward to if they are not believers.  Peter reminds them that they could be suffering for no eternal purpose at all.

The second thing Peter reminds them of is in 3:18, “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God”.  The reason Peter is confident that they will suffer for doing right, is that their very Lord, Jesus Christ, suffered for doing the right thing.  Jesus saw the eternal goal of bringing us back to God as worth the suffering on the cross.  Do we see our suffering as worth it?  We have to remember we suffer for an eternal prize, taking as many people to heaven with us. Stoics simply endure suffering, while ascetics welcome it.  Christians are neither.  We only suffer because God loved us, and we in turn love others so much that we are willing to give our lives for them.

Third, Peter says we should expect to suffer for doing right in 4:12, “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. ”  Sometimes, we act so surprised when Satan attacks us, and cry out to God in disbelief that He allowed that to happen.  Peter knew it was coming, and so he was spiritually and mentally prepared for battle.  Paul tried to prepare Timothy in the same way in 2 Timothy 3:12, “Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.”  I don’t see any maybes there.

Finally, Peter gives them the ultimate hope in 5:10, “And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.”  This suffering will not last forever!  Peter considered this life “a little while” in comparison to living in eternity with God in peace and blessing.  Jim Elliot is with Jesus in heaven, and he will never suffer again.  This whole series on suffering has been difficult to write, and I have noticed that it has been one of my least “popular” series of posts.  I know we don’t enjoy reading about suffering.  Some people think if they are reading about suffering, it means that God is about to lead them into a time of suffering and is preparing them.  I just know it is part of life, and of course, we would all rather skip it.  Some suffer more than others, but if we are to be ministers of hope into this world, we have to know how to comfort those in pain.  Jesus was the great physician who didn’t avoid people who were suffering, He was drawn right to them.

When I was college, I used to work with our local electric company in the summers.  I lived in Kentucky then, and we would drive out to these remote spots in the countryside to do jobs.  One area we worked in would always take us right by this sign by the highway.  I knew the sign well, as when my family would drive to Cincinnati, my sisters and I would talk about the story behind the sign.  It was there in 1988, that a man was driving drunk and crashed into a school bus full of teenagers on a church youth group trip.  Many of the children died in the crash, and it was a horrible tragedy.   How could God allow this to happen?  How is this fair and right that these children died due to the actions of just one man?

The Bible is full of stories where the actions and sins of just one man (or woman, we want to be equal opportunity here)  completely affect and cause suffering for many.  In Kings and Chronicles, this is obvious in the lives of the kings and rulers like Ahab, Jezebel, Ahaz, Manasseh, and David.  We have already established that God doesn’t punish or judge people for the sins of others (Ezekiel 18).  However, God does allow the consequences of other people’s sins to affect both Christians and non Christians.  He is not “teaching us something” or “disciplining us” and it isn’t Satan directly doing something to us.  It is simply a world in which God allows man freedom of choice.

In Romans 1:18-22 Paul states that man has rejected God for idols, thereby bringing God’s wrath down upon himself.  What does this wrath really look like here?  It is not lightning bolts or enemy armies that we see in other judgment passages.  In 1:24-25, Paul gives God’s judgment, “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever!”  God’s judgment was to let us do exactly what we wanted to do.  The chapter continues with lists of worse and worse sins.  Look what we do to each other, “They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,  foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.”

So, to take away horrible bus crashes and many of the horrible atrocities that happen, God would have to take away free will.  We want to blame God, but we need to blame ourselves.  Of course in the case of the bus crash, the real issue isn’t whether the drunk driver is to blame, it is how God could allow this?  how is this fair?  The hard answers are that God isn’t fair and there are no satisfying answers as to why God didn’t stop this tragedy from happening.  In Romans 9:16, Paul understands the question of God’s fairness, “So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy.”  God is just and merciful, not fair.

God created the world in His image and it was all “very good”.  Man didn’t like that world, wanted to be his own god, and so we have remade the world into our image.  That world is full of gang violence, wars, genocides, and death.  We can’t blame God for this suffering, as He “gave us up” to do what we wanted to do.  We want to think only of ourselves and drive drunk, regardless of the consequences it might inflict on others.  It scares me to death thinking about the times I drove drunk in college and what horrible things I could have done.  God will end this suffering when sinful nature is taken away at the end of time.  Until then, we  again should be there for people when things like this happen, without having to tell the person who to blame.  Until then, I will think of that sign beside the road and think carefully about how my actions can bring suffering to others.

Who really likes to talk about discipline?  Some trials and suffering in my life God?  Yes, please.  You won’t go into Borders or your bookstore and find that a book on God’s discipline has crossed over and finally moved the Left Behind display to the back of the store.  The Shack won’t be followed up another best seller called The Woodshed (where God takes you when He isn’t baking you scones or hanging out on the lake with you).  No one likes to be disciplined, unless you are an ascetic monk in a Dan Brown movie.  Yet, somewhere deep down inside us, we realize that this world would be complete chaos if not for the discipline of parents and our governments.  Those of us who are parents understand that our kids aren’t just naturally “good” all the time (understatement of the year?).  Recently I was pulled over here in Taiwan for turning out of the wrong lane (I used the dumb foreigner excuse, and it worked this time).  Of course, I would rather have not been disciplined, but I also am constantly complaining that the police don’t do more with crazy moto drivers that are driving down the wrong side of the road.

We can’t talk about why Christians suffer without talking about the discipline of God.  In my experience, the top two reasons Christians think they are suffering are spiritual warfare or discipline of God. I guess which they choose of these two often has to do with how guilty they are feeling, whether they have an angry God concept or not, or whether they think that there is a demon under every rock.  Hebrews 12 is one of the best teachings in the New Testament on discipline.  The author of Hebrews (insert your favorite theory here) says in 12:7-8, “It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.”  The recipients of this letter were going through suffering, and God had shown the author that it was discipline.  He gives the always encouraging thought, “In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.”  Maybe don’t use this line in your next counseling session.

I believe most people think that God’s temporal discipline was only in the old covenant (Old Testament).  We read accounts in Joel of locust attacks and say, “Whew, am I glad that I don’t live in Old Testament Israel!”  Yes, it is true that we are not bound by the blessings and curses in Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26.  However, the New Testament has narrative and epistle examples of discipline in the church.  I already mentioned Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5:1-11.  This is a drastic example, but it had a profound effect, “And great fear came upon the whole church and upon all who heard of these things.”  An example I don’t always hear much about is in 1 Corinthians 11:17-34.  The Corinthian church is taking communion in an unholy fashion, and as  the judgment of God, Paul says, “That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.”  Wow!  I bet we will all think twice now before taking the tasteless wafer and little plastic cup of juice!

The bottom line is that the fear of the Lord in our lives is a GOOD thing.  Jews of the Old Testament understood this, and Solomon lays it down in Proverbs 1:7, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge”.  Only dumb people don’t fear God, and personally I would rather avoid both discipline and stupidity in my life.  Unfortunately, I hang on to old sins, develop new ones, and eventually need God’s discipline.  I have had times when bad things happen in my life, I pray and ask God what is going on, and He tells He is allowing the suffering to discipline me for some sin I need to get rid of.  That discipline has taken different forms from illness to busted water lines, and God always tells me because He wants me to change.  He knows that the sin is causing harm in my life and in the lives of those around me.

I want to say again that each time we face suffering, we have to go to God and ask Him what is going on.  It is not always discipline, just like it is not always from a fallen world.  There can be no set answers from us to other people like “there must be sin in the camp” (one of my least favorites for sure, partly because it is a heavy use of Christian jargon that makes us sound like we live on a compound and call our pastor the Prophet).  I would rather embrace the fear of the Lord rather than become a grace abuser who is always blaming other people (or God) for bad things.  Who’s your Daddy?

Most of the time, I don’t think too seriously about Adam and Eve.  I mean, all the funny pictures of them covered in leaves, eating the apple, does not beg for a serious tone.  Especially when you add a talking snake to the picture,  you have the makings of a fun Disney movie (now that they have cool computer animation the snake wouldn’t look too cheesy).  I worry however, that I can end up treating the whole story like a myth, which would land me squarely in the boisterous, liberal crowd who also doubts half the Bible is true.  Ummm, not where I want to be.  In today’s post, we will focus on the disasterous consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin and how it impacts our topic of why Christians suffer.

After confronting Adam and Eve, God spells out clearly the judgments (usually called  “curses” when relating to the fall of man) that man so richly deserves for his rebellion against God.  The judgments in Genesis 3:14-24 are: 1) humbling of Satan (14); 2) enmity between man and Satan (15); 3) pain in childbearing (16); 4) broken husband/wife relationships (16); 5) curse of thorns and toil in work (17-18); 6) physical death (19); and finally 7) being kicked out of the garden (22-24).  This means that for all of us after Adam, we are born into a world with spiritual warfare and demons, pain and childbearing complications, marital strife, nature working against us, death, and a broken relationship with God.

We don’t get to choose to avoid these things, and they are a result of both Adam’s sin and our sin from Adam (Romans 5).  As such, they are from specific sins we all do, however in a sense, they are from sin in general (cumulative effect).  Let me give you examples.  When my father has to work extremely hard as a farmer to battle weeds, drought, or blight, it is mainly due to the fact that he was born into a fallen world.  Of course, there are Biblical examples of God using drought or blight as a specific judgment, but most of the time, weeds are just weeds.  They afflict everyone, and have become “normal”.  Everyone dies.  Yes, we die because sin is in the world (Romans 6:23), but it is not a “specific” judgment like Ananias and Saphira dropping dead on the spot (Acts 5).  We think of death as “normal”, but we Christians must remember that death is not normal at all.  Adam and Eve had eternal life until they sinned.

All of creation was tainted by the fall and sin.  Paul describes this in Romans 8:19-20, “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it”.  I like the translations that say, “creation groans” in verse 19, because it gives us the full emotion of the situation of how the fall affected our world.  Tsunamis, earthquakes, cancer, birth defects, and death in all it’s forms are all part of the “futility” that Paul is speaking of.  So, when Christians suffer from earthquakes or famines, it is not necessarily the case that God is “disciplining” them or that it is “spiritual warfare”.  Most of the time, it is simply that we as Christians are not immune to the effects of the fall.  We too are plagued by the curse on this world.

As I searched for answers about our baby dying, I eventually felt that the effects of the fall were what caused it to happen.  Of course, I know God can stop the effects of the fall happening at any time.  Elijah going straight from life to afterlife is a radical example, as is the raising of Lazarus.  Much of the time however, God doesn’t reverse the effects of the fall.  We can’t blame Him, because as Paul says in Romans 1 and 5, we have no one to blame but ourselves.  Adam and Eve sinned, but so did we, and in doing so, our sin together with Adam’s brought the judgment of the curses.  When will it all end?  Paul already told us in Romans 8, “the revealing of the sons of God” and when you read on in the passage, the second coming is when the curses of the fall will be lifted.  We will finally have a “new heavens and a new earth” (Isaiah 65:17) and be restored back to the garden relationship with God.

Sometimes, I wish God would hurry up and end this all.  If Jesus returned today, the new heavens and earth would be here, and we could say goodbye to cancer, hurricanes, and death.  One verse has challenged me in my feelings about this.  In 2 Peter, Peter is addressing false teachers and scoffers who say that the world will never end.  Here is Peter’s response in 3:9, “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”  The moment God ends the world is the moment all non-believers go to Hell.  Is my suffering in this fallen world worth the opportunity for one more person to spend eternity in heaven?